Myself and MadScientist have been working on a bit of a project recently. We have been designing a tabletop RPG from the ground up. Edit: And apparently, we're blogging about it. -= urunearpg.wordpress.com =- Urunea stems from my own history with various RPG systems and coming to the conclusion that each one has something wonderful on offer, but a lot of other convoluted red tape that gets in the way. DnD has too many additive modifiers to a single dice roll and a reliance on “all” the different dice forms, making a turn more about adding and selecting the right dice than getting stuck into to game. Warhammer 40k Roleplay has an unsettling number of skills, talents, traits, and mutations that makes trying to make a character a slow decent into madness… let alone making a set of opponents for the party to fight. GURPS? don’t even get me started… I wanted to play something simple, yet deep. Something that takes my love of a narrative RPG experience and merges it with my love of the tabletop. Something that takes my Character’s statistics and makes them a tangible part of play. Something that didn’t have a 300 page rulebook, a GM handbook and a Bestiary. ...And so, with some help, I decided to make it... Urunea is an unusual RPG (or at least we would like to think so), in that it takes the traditional tabletop RPG format and blends in some elements of modern euro-style board games and card based mechanics. It is designed to be fairly lightweight compared to many other RPGs, avoiding much of the complex and “crunchy” mathematics common in this kind of game that bog down the actions of the players, while still presenting interesting player choices and a Character Sheet unlike any you’ve seen before. The dice rolling system encourages players to come up with inventive ways of approaching tasks, and manages to create an exhaustion system without relying on arbitrary numerical debuffs. Myself and MadScientist have put in a ton of work over the past few months and we’ve come to the point at which we can’t keep this project under wraps any longer. We need people to help us play, test, break and reforge it until it’s perfect… or as close as it’s possible to be. We’ve already began some playtesting, and so far the results are encouraging. We thought we would drop a line to anyone here to see if they are interested in taking part in further playtests. We are looking for, both old RPG hands and brand new roleplayers who can give us feedback on what the RPG needs to progress forwards. What we would really like to find are people with GMing experience to see if they are interested in running a quick event so that we can test how easy the system is to manage when I’m not running it. We’re putting together a complete ruleset that’s system neutral; able to be applied to any setting you can imagine and any character you can devise. To get you started we’ve gathered together a few folks of varying levels of RPG experience and set them the task of making a character using this summarised version of our main Character building rules. -= https://docs.google.com/document/d/1y-J77b_rYhDzTx5lfRvz56YFs71H06Zyj7KLgprjjy4/ =- And once they completed them, put them through a test of their mettle using one of the best (in my opinion) online tabletop RPG programs there is; Roll20. (http://roll20.net) Here’s a (long) video of how they got on. -= =- We intend to make this into as much of a polished release as we have time to do. Although a lot of stuff is noted down on google-docs type files as linked to above, we’ve also put some work into formalising the whole thing into a PDF. We are particularly interested in people’s impressions of the quality of the document, and how easy it is to read, so we’ve decided to release the first chapter here incase anyone wants a look. -= https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9708514/urunea_chapter_1.pdf =- Thank you for your time, and we hope you are interested in taking part.
Looks like interesting stuff. I don't quite have the time to participate right now, but I'll definitely keep an eye on this project.
My Witty commentary on that video is great stuff. Maybe next time I can actually do things yeah? ;p Mike
I've always wanted to make a tabletop RPG myself, and have played a good number of systems. I'd be more than happy to help playtest, and I have some GM experience in D&D 3-3.5 and Unisystem(AFMBE). Are you guys cool with real-world playtesting or do you want it to all be closed? A dedicated combat subsection in the quickstart would be nice. You need to understand what rolls you'll be making in combat if you want to build a character around anything related to it.
A summary of the Combat is on the way next. There's a few tweaks that we're working out when it comes to the difference between exhaustion and damage. We'll add a Combat Quickstart to the first post when we can, though for the time being it's perfectly possible to test your Characters by giving them some Tasks to complete. As the GM, you just need to judge how difficult something is. If you're interested in testing the game in a real-world sense with your own RPG group then please go right ahead. We're using cards (half the size of a regular poker card) for human-sized Adventurers / Foes, but it's completely transferable if you're using miniatures or square/circular tokens for your PCs and their opponents. Just give us as much feedback as you can after the dust settles. We're working on releasing the non-combat side of the Urunean RPG system too; all we need to do is condense about 7 or 8 pages in half.
